Hi Rebecca,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 2: I have 2 or 3 emerging interests but am unsure how to figure out which one to pursue .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were benevolence, security, and universalism.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.
You said your top three talents were spiritual, artistic / spatial, and verbal.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to find a job for after graduation .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in Music .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt Hurt when receiving critical feedback, and Hurt when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling a lot of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being job .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .
In one word, you said it made you feel Nostalgic .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
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| One can change their grit capacity |
| Interest takes time to develop, and it's often not a one way path. |
| Personality can change over time |
| Career is not everything |
| Deliberate practice can be done by anyone. Quality of practice truly matters when trying to be an expert at anything |
| Advice helps the advice giver |
| Failure can help or hurt you depending on your perspective |
| Change your situation rather than willpower your way into achieving a goal |
| Everyone needs someone to pour into their life. |
| A life devoted to others gives us meaning |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
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| Jaron Choe |
| Rebecca!!!
My classmate who I sat next to. Who is one of the kindest and sweetest souls I've ever met. I'm glad to have been randomly placed in your time and a seat next to you, I have had a wonderful time going through this course with you. Your sincerity, kindness, intelligence and how good your heart is, has been so wonderful to get to know over the course over the semester. I will always consider you my friend, and even though I may not be in America for much longer, if you ever come to Australia you must contact me because I would be so excited to see you again!
Your discovery project and presentation was beautiful to watch. To see you explore and try out new things was really inspiring to see. Bumping into you at the one time I decided to go to judo at Penn was such a funny coincidence, but also so inspiring. I've been there myself as a newbie, and I know how hard it is, so I have such huge respect for people who try out something completely different. When you fail at learning guitar you play a wrong note, but when you fail at judo you fall ungracefully and it hurts too. So to see that you willingly put yourself through that even if only for a few weeks is testament to your character and that your willing to fail in order to grow and to learn. I know your still searching for what you want to do with your life. And that's such a hard choice to make. But I know whatever journey you end up going on, it's going to be a wonderful journey. You'll bless the lives of people around you in whatever job, and you'll continue to grow into an even more amazing person at each turn of the road. Rebecca, it was my pleasure to meet you and to call you my friend. I wish you all the very best, I know everything will turn out just amazing for you! |
| Nathan Xu |
| Thanks for a great semester, Rebecca. Your diligence, kindness, and unassuming leadership abilities have not gone unnoticed. I greatly appreciate the effort you consistently invested in making everyone in our team feel not just included but genuinely welcomed and valued - even after a long, tiring week of studying! Your unassuming leadership style, marked by humility and genuine care for each team member, has been a cornerstone of our group dynamics. It's evident that you lead by example, and your actions have set a standard of excellence that inspired the entire team.
Your Discovery project presentation where you sampled a variety of activities to gain insight and direction for your life was valuable for me as well! I resonated with all three main takeaways you gained from your project: “believing I can change”, “prioritizing community”, and “normalizing/celebrating failure”; and I sincerely appreciate your advice in becoming ‘unstuck’. |
| Danny Weinberger |
| Rebecca enlightened us with her kind demeanor in every grit-lab class. Her soft spoken-ness should not deceive you for a lack of profoundness, as I have learned many lessons from Rebecca that I am grateful for. I still remember during the first class she was hesitant to share her act of kindness which was helping her parents drive for 2-weeks in the summer, thinking it wasn’t so great. I told her then and am repeating it now that it was a beautiful act of kindness. She has continued to inspire me throughout the semester with a deep display of Grit. Thank you Rebecca!
Rebecca’s Discovery Project was a display of extreme bravery. In our times it is becoming progressively harder to be vulnerable and open up about yourself, but Rebecca was able to overcome it all for her project. Rebecca shared that she was stuck, not knowing where she’s going or what she’s doing. She decided to explore many different things and discover herself. The process of self-discovery can be a lifelong one, but Rebecca has taught us all that we should never feel too stuck to try!
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We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.